


no rest for the wicked, huh

by bleepblorp



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Addiction, Benny Lafitte Lives, Blood, Blood Drinking, Blood Loss, Character Study, Gen, Hurt/very little comfort, Just a lot of blood, Sam Winchester Attempts the Trials of Hell, Season/Series 08, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Triggers, as in sam experiences triggers, no plot just vibes, the comfort is gentle bullying and getting them some water, though that only applies for the very last scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:26:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28740210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bleepblorp/pseuds/bleepblorp
Summary: “Sam,” Benny says, and laughs. It sounds wet. “Sammy Winchester. One might think your timing a little suspicious, if one were being uncharitable.”Hypocrite, he doesn’t say. “Well I did almost pull a machete on you,” he does say, trying to assess the damage, difficult when his patient is something already dead. “Charity would be a lot to ask.”He is having a little difficulty thinking through the heavy, warm scent of blood filling his nostrils.Sam tries to be good, whatever that means.
Relationships: Benny Lafitte & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, dean's season 8 relationship drama in the bg
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	no rest for the wicked, huh

**Author's Note:**

> anyway after years of ignoring supernatural im back in it i guess

“Sorry to hear about your lady problems, dude,” Charlie says.

Sam looks up from what he’s doing, brow furrowing. Dean gossips like a bored housewife at any given opportunity. “It’s fine,” he says, a reflex. “Well, not fine, but I’m, you know, used to it.”

Charlie’s mouth goes thin and she pats his head, awkwardly. “Sorry, buddy.”

Sam blinks. “Thanks.”

“Is, uh,” she begins, fidgeting slightly. “Dean seemed really skittish when I asked about his breakup. Is he doing okay?”

Sam freezes, his fingers hovering over the keyboard, something a little like guilt trickling down his spine. “Yeah. Yeah he’s you know, used to it too. Part of the gig.”

She frowns. “That’s a little fucked up.”

Sam snorts. “Understatement of the century.”

Charlie’s silence is watery, like the bubble of surface tension on a too-full glass, so Sam sighs and turns to fully face her. She’s looking at the ground, biting her lip.

“You’re already on a much different track from us,” he tells her, and she finally looks at him. “No matter how long you’ve been on the run, you’re choosing to fight for a home now. That’s more than either of us has ever done.”

“It doesn’t seem that way,” she says, eyes far away. “It seems like the fighting just got too hard.”

“Yeah, well,” Sam says with a small smile. “You’re a lot tougher than us.”

She sways slightly, all her weight on her back foot and performs a mocking half-bow. “Damn straight.”

* * *

“We’re getting too old for this,” Sam says, balling up his overcoat and tossing it to the other side of the back seat and straightening up for what would be the last time in several hours. “You’re not doing your back any favors, you know.”

“That’s what Advil is for. I just need a couple hours,” Dean says, already stretched out across the front seat, with his feet up against the passenger side window. “Driving while fatigued is as bad as driving drunk, you know,” he continues in a familiar mockery, a pinched, haughty tone.

Sam frowns and ducks his head back into the car to glare at Dean, who, arm draped over his eyes, misses it. “Is that supposed to be me?”

Dean grins instead of answering. “Besides,” he says. “Keeps you young.”

Sam groans and stretches, pulling his clasped hands out behind him until it feels like his ribs might pull away from his sternum entirely. “What it does,” he says. “Is make me grateful for shitty motel mattresses.”

Dean clicks his tongue twice, sending vague finger guns in Sam’s direction.

Sam twists, trying to get some tension out of his spine, when a familiar smell hits him all at once. _Hotsweetiron_.

His mouth goes dry and then begins to water.

He’s already moving before his brain registers, and only stops when Dean calls out “Hey!”

“I just need to piss,” Sam says absently. “I’ll be back.”

Dean grumbles a reply, but Sam is already moving. The blood smells thicker the further from the road he moves, and it isn’t demon blood but it smells just wrong enough that he thinks he should investigate.

Dean needs the sleep more than he does, doesn’t need to worry himself about something that has already lost so much blood. It’s probably dead already.

He tells himself that, at least, trying not to feel like he’s hiding.

 _You lying junkie_ , something in him purrs, snide and knowing.

He ignores it and follows his nose to the source.

He almost trips over it in the dark.

There’s a groan on the ground, and for all that the blood smells wrong, it‘s a distinctly human sound and his heart lurches.

“Hey, stay with me,” Sam says and drops down, cupping the man’s jaw, tilting his face up, searching for the source of the blood. And his breath catches even as the man’s eyes shoot open, focusing on Sam’s face.

“Sam,” Benny says, and laughs. It sounds wet. “Sammy Winchester. One might think your timing a little suspicious, if one were being uncharitable.”

 _Hypocrite_ , he doesn’t say. “Well I did almost pull a machete on you,” he does say, trying to assess the damage, difficult when his patient is something already dead. “Charity would be a lot to ask.”

He is having a little difficulty thinking through the heavy, warm scent of blood filling his nostrils.

“Don’t forget you hired someone to stalk me,” Benny says. “You sure know how to make a monster feel special.”

“I see my reputation precedes me,” Sam says, absently.

Benny’s head rolls to the side, piercing eyes on Sam’s temple. “You gonna kill me?”

Sam’s hands shake. “I should.” He reaches for his knife without looking, knows where any weapon is on him at any given time.

Benny’s eyes slide shut, tilts his head back.

The knife is too small to get the job done, not cleanly, but Benny closes his eyes and bares his throat.

Sam grimaces, an old, ugly hatred flaring in his stomach, and he draws the knife against his own skin, where his pulse beats sure and strong through the thin skin of his wrist.

Benny’s eyes fly open, sharp and inhuman and Sam fights back the urge to spring away, to bring his too-small knife down. He watches Benny’s nostrils flare, but he is otherwise, completely, impossibly still.

“I see,” Benny says, voice gone low, the barest hint of a waver. “You trying to get me to jump you, make you feel better about liberating my head from my body.”

“I’m not in the business of giving anything I plan on killing the upper hand if I can help it,” Sam says through his clenched jaw.

“Why the change of heart?” Benny asks, his chin meeting his chest, eyes almost entirely pupil as he looks up at Sam.

Sam lets his arm drop, a dribble of blood wending its way down his forearm to drip from his fingertips onto the earth below. “I don’t know how much Dean told you ‘bout me…”

“Couldn’t shut up about you.” The words are a slur, bleeding into each other.

Sam snorts. “Then you know that I have made more world ending fuckups than your average joe.”

Benny hums, not an argument nor an agreement.

“Point is,” Sam says slow and easy. “I know a thing or two about atonement.”

“That what this is?” Benny asks, eyes flicking to the wet stream of blood parting and meeting, molasses slow, down Sam’s forearm.

He almost scoffs at that. “I wish atoning were as easy as bleeding.” _As easy as jumping, as letting yourself fall._

Sam holds out his still bleeding forearm. He wonders if Benny will kill him, refuse, keep baring his throat like a plea, but he just ducks his head.

Benny’s mouth is cold against his skin, and this lends the whole situation an almost clinical air. Cold knife, cold air, cold mouth. Even the light of the moon filtering through the trees is chilly and uninviting and he thinks of the artificial chill of hospital rooms, bare feet on tile, the only shield a flimsy paper gown, and shivers.

Sam hoped it might help, if he could not compare this to Ruby (hot mouth, burning blood, sweat) but it doesn’t.

He wonders if this was Ruby’s view of the crown of his head, wonders if she felt as in control as she always seemed, while he had been all heedless abandon and reckless thirst.

He doesn’t feel in control now, like he is watching this happen.

He has to look away. He feels bile rise in his throat.

Benny pulls away, and Sam cannot help but compare this show of self-control to Ruby’s iron fingers in his hair, pulling his head back and her voice feather soft in his ear: _that’s enough_.

Benny lounges back, color returning to his face, and his lips are clean and Sam, light headed and a little nauseous, wants to laugh. The fucking vampire even has better manners than him. Is _cleaner_.

“I’d really appreciate it if you kept our little rendezvous to yourself,” Benny says, and Dean’s name sits heavy and unspoken between them.

Sam thinks of his conversation with Charlie. The guilt, when he experimentally probes at it, still aches like bruised flesh, even after all this, and he flinches away from it. “No problem,” he says, and leaves, his own blood bubbling up through the gaps in his fingers as he grips the wound on his forearm.

He marches his way back down the empty road to the gas station they passed awhile back, carefully putting one foot in front of the other, the silence pounding at his eardrums and black dots forming at the edges of his vision.

He buys a candy bar, gauze and rubbing alcohol in exchange for the key to the bathroom and the bored cashier doesn’t allow her eyes to flick to the blood staining his cuff.

As he makes is way across the off-white linoleum, yellowed with age, he shoves the candy bar almost whole into his mouth, tough and gluey and slow-going, and hopes that it will help with the blood loss. Dean would never let him live it down if he passed out in some grimy, backwoods gas station bathroom. The latest in Sam ‘damsel-in-distress’ Winchester’s inglorious rescues.

The ugly fluorescent lights burn his retinas, and their obnoxious hum makes his head swim and his hands shake as he washes the wound out in the grayish bathroom sink. The trail of rust from the faucet to the drain is a funhouse mirror reflection the fresh blood he washes down it: distorted, off.

The scent of isopropyl, burning his nose hairs and making him grimace, does not last, but the tang of iron and salt lingers in the back of his throat all the way back to the car. It stays when Dean grumbles sleepily as Sam settles into the backseat, putting the gun back down as soon as he recognizes him, and it stays as he lies there, awake despite his slowed pulse and heavy eyelids, and it is still there when they drive off into the horizon, chasing the first hints of dawn, Dean complaining about his back.

Sam, tucking himself as close to the passenger side door as he can as Dean grasps for the pill bottle in the glove compartment, marvels that Dean can’t smell it on him.

“Liver’s already shot to hell anyway,” Dean says, misinterpreting Sam’s baleful look and tosses back the capful of ibuprofen.

Dean’s flippant tone makes Sam’s mouth twist and his stomach sour but he says nothing.

_Hypocrite. Lying junkie._

Sam’s hands shake and he tilts his head back, closing his eyes against the weak morning sun.

* * *

Sam snorts as Dean smacks his thigh against the side mirror and then tries to cover it up by leaning against the hood in a way he must think is suave as he turns to wave back at Aaron one more time.

“Really?” Sam says as Dean drops into the driver’s seat. He aims for their old shtick: his teasing, Dean’s shamelessness, but he falls short, smiling too wide, too thrilled that Dean, flustered and wrong footed as he is, seems to be having _fun_.

“Come on Sammy,” he says, keeping a firm eye on the road even as his fingers twitch on the gearshift. Sam waits for the devil-may-care grin and the _you never let me have any fun_ , but instead Dean still refuses to look at him and says: “We’re not having this talk.”

“No, I just,” Sam pauses. “He doesn’t really seem like your type is all.”

“Not buxom enough?” Dean asks, tone so forced light it almost hurts.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“What do you mean, then?” It is said like a challenge and Sam sees Dean’s jaw dimple with tension momentarily.

 _Doomed,_ he doesn’t say, because Dean would call him a hypocrite. “Not quite so,” _normal_ “Short.”

Dean snorts like he could read Sam’s thoughts. “Maybe I’m sick of the tragic romance thing,” he says.

Sam slouches low in his seat.

Dean lets out a soft, disbelieving little laugh. “I mean, when was the last time someone looked at you and you felt _normal_?”

Sam doesn’t have an answer. Even when Amelia looked at him, what she saw was her loss and her pain mirrored back at her. Even with the dog and the white picket fence, he still felt wrong, he had always felt _wrong_. And if he thinks even further back he’ll get to _Jess_ and—

“Hey,” Dean says, pointing to a giant billboard as they pass. “A, for personal injury attorney.”

Sam snorts, because this is a bullshit road trip game that Dean hasn’t pulled out since they were kids to distract Sam when he got too carsick to read anymore. Sam points to a second one. “B, Al’s BBQ,” he says because it is also an olive branch, a silent acknowledgement that they had both tread a little too close to sensitive ground.

Dean gets shafted with Q and Sam delights in shutting him down when he insists that the K in Kwik Stop should count on principle and Dean grumbles something about the unfair advantage Sam’s unfinished law degree gives him when they argue and it all stings on just the right side of nostalgia.

* * *

The coffee is thick, spoon-standing-up-in-it thick, and Sam purses his lips, groping for the sugar to dump a little more in, without looking away from his screen. He’s been staring at the same article for what feels like hours, not processing a single word, the harsh light making the backs of his eyeballs hurt.

There is a persistent pain between his eyes and a bone deep ache in his limbs; his lungs itch when they don’t simply hurt.

He takes another sip and sighs in relief. The sugar helps, it’s still thick, but it’s warm and sweet and _perfect._

And gone.

“Yoink,” Dean says as he nabs the mug from between Sam’s stiff fingers, like he’s out of a cartoon or something, narrating his action through onomatopoeia.

Sam sighs and lets his fingers fall closed on empty air. “Asshole,” he says, completely without bite.

Dean shrugs, giving his best _who me?_ grin, an echo of Dean, at twenty-something, blatantly lying to a cop about ‘his whereabouts on Wednesday night’. “I need a pick-me-up,” he says. “You,” he points at Sam with the index finger of the hand wrapped around the mug. “Need a nap.”

“Dean,” Sam starts, but Dean’s disgusted noise as he takes a sip of the stolen coffee cuts him off.

“You must be more out of it than I thought,” Dean says, shuddering and pulling an exaggerated grimace. “This is chock full of _salt_.”

“What?” Sam says, reaching out to snatch the coffee back. “No it’s not.” He takes an experimental sip and frowns. It _is_ salty, but it doesn’t make him shudder the way Dean had. It tastes familiar: warm and thick and _right_ sliding down his throat _._

“Huh,” he says. His hands shake as he sets it down, silently begging Dean to take it away from him before he downs the whole thing.

Dean does. Slowly reaching for it, then all at once, grabbing it and whisking it away to the sink.

He wants to believe that this means he _is_ being purified, that the salt, soothing on his parched throat rather than leaving it raw and bloody, is proof of his ascendance.

 _You lying junkie_.

“Hey, space cadet,” Dean calls from the kitchen, and Sam can’t see his face, but he can hear the strained smile in his voice. “You ready to talk about that nap now?”

Sam doesn’t fight him, even though sleep feels so useless. He’s just so tired of fighting Dean on everything. Ever since the very first trial, it has been an uphill battle to get Dean to let him _finish_ this. If taking a nap will get Dean off his back for a little while, he’ll concede. This time.

* * *

“Whatever you’re up to,” Meg says suddenly, and Sam tenses. She’d carefully stuck to gossip until now and while Sam really does not want to think about the many ways he had failed Amelia (and Dean and Kevin and Cas and the fucking _dog_ and—), it was at least a distraction. But she surprises him by not pushing it. “Is it worth it?”

He turns to face her, eyebrows rising and she rolls her eyes. She gestures to him vaguely. “You look like warmed over shit,” she says.

He sways a little bit where he stands. “Pot. Kettle. Glass houses. Etcetera,” he shoots back.

“I’ve been on the receiving end of torture by the actual _K_ _ing_ of _H_ _ell_ for months,” she says. “What’s your excuse?”

“Fair enough,” he says with a snort. “Yeah. It’s definitely worth it. It’s going to fix everything. It’s going to fix…” _me._

“Ah,” she says, swaying hips and knowing smile and Sam’s skin crawls briefly at how _well_ he knows her. “You think this is going to absolve you of the very sin of being born.”

He hunches his shoulders. “And whose fault is that?” He points out and promptly flinches. It’s as good as an admission.

“Hey now,” she says. “Can’t be all bad.”

“No,” he says, but it’s toothless. “No it definitely can be.”

“Why, exactly?” She drawls.

“It’s evil,” he says. Rote. He looks down at his hands and flexes them and tries not to think of the rush of power. The desire dulled by age but never gone.

“The Sam I knew not so long ago had a more nuanced view of things,” she says with a cheeky wink. “What happened?”

He fights not to hunch his shoulders again. “I don’t need to defend my beliefs to you.”

She rolls her eyes. “Come on, you don’t think _you’re_ evil, do you?”

He scowls and tries to focus on the sigils, slow perfect lines. The paint dribbles a bit, the nozzle faltering. He shakes the can, ignoring the way his joints protest the lateral motion, jarring his arm all the way up to his shoulder.

“Oh _,_ ” she says, and it’s like she is trying to sound thrilled about it, but falls just short. “Oh we did a number on you, didn’t we.”

He does his best to ignore her.

“Look, Bullwinkle. You think we’d have to go to so much trouble to turn you if you were _inherently_ evil?”

He blinks, purses his mouth in a suspicious line. “What are you trying with this?” He turns to face her, red spray paint dripping down his wrist. His mouth goes dry momentarily, his throat aches, but it’s bright red and cold against his feverish skin and he doesn’t have to convince himself it’s not blood.

She shrugs. “You ever consider that I’m the oldest friend you got? Maybe that cuts both ways. We’re both a little low on those at the moment.”

“Oh?” He asks with a little disbelieving huff of laughter. “You looked pretty friendly with Cas.”

“Come on,” she says, her eyes drifting to the entryway to the crypt even as her lips curve into that impenetrable smirk. “You know that’s going nowhere fast.”

 _Maybe I’m sick of the tragic romance thing_ , Dean said only a few weeks ago. “Yeah,” Sam says. “Yeah, I know.”

“Hey,” she says, tugging his sleeve as her eyes slide past him. “We’ve got company.”

He turns and she’s right. His stomach drops even as his blood heats in anticipation of a fight.

Meg seems to read his mind and tosses a wink his way. “For old times’ sake?”

* * *

Benny tells him to go, tired eyes and a resigned smile.

Sam spent most of his childhood and his brief stint of freedom at Stanford feeling like the last piece of a poorly made puzzle. A poor fit where he belonged and aching for his ill-fitting home when he left.

Benny would leave an ill-fitting space in Dean’s life if he stayed here.

Sam thinks of Dean, trying to use Sam as an excuse to fling himself on any sword he can find, thinks of the determined resignation in his eyes when he said he saw no way out and decides, actually, fuck this.

Maybe he’s a little wobbly and maybe Dean never would have let him fight off this many vampires if he were here, but Dean _isn’t_ here, and that’s the problem.

So he firms his grip on the makeshift hatchet and he sets his jaw and he swings.

* * *

Sam is winded, but he refuses to lean against anything. He is in enemy territory and his hindbrain cannot forget that this vampire has his fangs bared, even when they fought as allies a moment ago.

“That was a mighty big risk,” Benny says, carefully. His posture is that of a wary cat, not yet sure if what he is facing is a predator or a friend. “Putting all your hard work on the line for li’l ol’ me.”

Sam snorts. He is furious, but he’s used to that by now. “What can I say, reckless stubbornness runs in the family,” he says instead of _I refuse to be the reason Dean loses someone else so soon, not again_ or instead of _I am sick of being used like this_.

“Dean mentioned you might not be fighting fit,” Benny says. “He’d never forgive me if you got sloppy on my watch. If you didn’t make it out.”

 _Hypocrite_ , Sam does not say. “I could handle that fight in my sleep,” he does say, holding out his still bleeding forearm. He wonders if Benny will pick the fight, beg, run, knock him down, but he just ducks his head and surrenders.

* * *

Sam can read the room, and he leaves Charlie and Dean outside to have their moment.

Dean is an _asshole_ , and yet he is so inherently good that people gravitate to him still. Sam tries so hard to be kind and caring and it is like people can tell that he is faking it, can sense the rottenness in him. It is why Dean manages to bond with everyone they meet and Sam stays on the periphery, why all of their friends, even the _monsters,_ choose Dean.

He wonders, sagging against the wall of the bunker, the cool stone a balm on his flushed cheek, if the Trials would have put this much strain on Dean, or if it only hurts him so much because he is already starting behind.

He draws himself up, ignoring the way his vision goes a little blurry and takes a step and another because self-pity is an indulgence they don’t have time for and this will finally _end_ it.

Pain means progress.

On his third step he careens sideways, his right knee suddenly gone to rubber.

And there is a solid shoulder to catch him.

He blinks slowly, his vision focusing, because Dean is still outside with Charlie and Kevin is _gone_ and Cas _left_.

“Come on now,” Benny says, voice unbearably gentle and Sam almost flinches away from it. “Sit yourself down.” He guides Sam to a seat and sets him down heavily. “Before you kill yourself.”

“This isn’t going to kill me,” Sam says, and his own voice sounds muffled through the blood pounding through his eardrums and making his temples and the space behind his eyes ache and burn. “Because I want to live. Dean… Dean would have let himself die.”

“Christ alive,” Benny says, so soft Sam thinks he maybe imagined it.

Sam’s head pulses with stabs of pain and he drapes an arm over his eyes to block out the red light filtering through his eyelids as though that may help. His arm feels too cold against his burning face. “If you had a chance to burn it out of you, would you take it?”

Benny is quiet, but he doesn’t ask for clarification. Sam thinks he gets it.

“Or are you worried that once you no longer have that excuse you have to face the idea that it’s you and it was never the blood, but something even deeper that made you what you are?” Sam mumbles.

“I’m going to get you some water,” Benny says instead of answering.

Sam reaches out, more of a flail than anything and Benny lets himself be caught by the wrist. _No pulse_ , Sam registers faintly, automatically. “I’m sorry,” he says and the apology feels too big for him, and too small for what he’s done.

“There’s no need for that,” Benny starts but Sam shakes his head vigorously.

“You thought I would let you die easy, even after I saved your life,” Sam insists. “You thought I was your way out because you know Dean never lets anything he cares about go. And you weren’t wrong.” He laughs, even though it isn’t really funny. Just because it makes sense. “It hurt you, didn’t it?” He says. “When I let you drink my blood. It burned and you knew then that I was the monster.”

“Are you apologizing for being a monster or for not living up to my expectations?” Benny asks, and there’s a sardonic edge to his tone that Sam kind of likes, it cuts through the haze, and it almost makes him shut up.

Almost.

“Both?” Questioning, like he knows it’s the wrong answer.

Benny pulls his wrist away, gently because Sam is weak enough to let him be gentle. “Water,” he repeats firmly, and Sam lets him go.

The glass is cool against his skin when Benny sets it down next to his forearm and Benny’s hand is ice cold against his forehead for a brief moment. Sam does not open his eyes.

“It’s exhausting,” Benny says, and again, it feels unreal, maybe just because he and Benny have barely spoken. Maybe Sam would not be able to tell the real Benny from a hallucination. “Trying to be something you’re not, no matter how much you want it.” He even sounds bone tired, like he’d sounded when he practically begged Sam to leave him in Purgatory. “No choice but to try, though.”

 _Even if it destroys me_. “No rest for the wicked, huh,” Sam mumbles.

He forces his eyes open, and who knew that even the fine muscles of his eyelids could be sore? He sits up straight and Benny is nowhere to be seen.

He sighs and chugs the room temperature water, the only proof that the whole conversation hadn’t been a figment of his feverish brain and he pulls his laptop across the table.

They have work to do.


End file.
